An orchestrator may schedule workload placements in “the cloud” (e.g., in a data center). Scheduling workload placement includes selecting a target compute host from a number of compute hosts. The workload may then be placed on the target compute host. One or more of a number of selection techniques may be utilized to select the target compute host, e.g., random selection, identifying and selecting a least-loaded compute host or randomly selecting a compute host from a plurality of compute hosts included in an availability zone. The number of compute hosts may be relatively large and the selection techniques may not necessarily make an optimum selection. For example, the orchestrator may place workloads onto target compute hosts based on a nominal capacity of each compute host before moving on to a next host (e.g., a bin packing scheduler). In another example, the orchestrator may consider only the compute resource and may ignore related resources such as network interfaces, memory architecture, etc.